Image scale when importing into Cricut Design Space

[Cathy9887]

Super brief intro about me - I am 100% self-taught on Inkscape.  15% via YouTube videos, 85% accidental find during trial & error button pushing.    That said, I feel pretty confident about where I am (for now, anyway) with regards to what I really use it for.  I consider myself fairly geeky & would say I'm pretty tech-savvy.  Where I get myself into the biggest messes is, attempting to follow instructions from someone who is intending them for someone with a bit more experience than I have.  75% of the time, it usually ends up working out in my favor... but that other 25%... **sigh**  not so much. 

That brings me to here.  I attempted to follow a couple different YouTube videos for changing the main template in Inkscape to fix the image scaling issue between Inkscape & the Cricut Design Space software.  Nothing has worked.. and in fact.. I'm pretty sure it made it worse.  Now, my Documents Properties box pops up waaaaay off to the right side of the screen, and I can usually barely click on it to drag it into view.  But the BIG issue is, when importing my images into Design Space, the image ends up being something ridiculous like 450 in x 512 in, and is placed somewhere around Timbuktu on the canvas.  I've got a "process" that has been working (go to the width box, enter the width listed in Inkscape, then tab to the X & Y boxes and enter 0.5 in both of them, so my image comes up to the top left corner), but when I have a pretty detailed image, WHOA NELLY, it takes a long time to load!!!  I understand that there's a difference with the way each software "defines an inch" and how many pixels should be counted within an inch - or something.. but what I don't know, is how to make them match... if it IS possible.

I used the SEARCH box to try & find other posts about this, and think I found one or two... but the verbiage on the one that seemed to fit my issue best took a bit of a left turn out of my field of familiarity.  If I have somehow completely missed an entire amazing thread on how to correct this issue, I deeply apologize & would love to know how I should search to find it.  I definitely don't mean to stink up the topics with redundancy. 

Thanks for your help & your "well paid" time!!  It is much appreciated!!
Cathy

[brynn]

Welcome Cathy!

See if this FAQ item helps you, regarding setting the scale properly:  https://inkscape.org/en/learn/faq/#inkscape-092-my-drawings-are-just-quarter-their-original-size-when-i-open-them-program-xyz  And if you open any existing files, you might have to repeat the process for each file.  But after you set the scale, all your future files will have the right scale.

Apparently it's a bug with the 0.92 series, where the Document Properties dialog opens mostly off-screen.  It drives me crazy!  I think it's only happening on Windows.  Hhmm....I wonder if anyone has officially filed a bug report on it?  I should probably check on that....

For very detailed images taking a long time to load, that probably means that the file is pretty large, and it's challenging your system resources (mostly RAM).  Do you have any slowdown or freezing while you're working in those files?  If so, you could read this tutorial, which gives ways to avoid that:  https://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/index.php?action=articles;sa=view;article=35

[Moini]

It's not only Windows for the doc props, happens for me too, on Linux.

As for Design space - try out some different templates that come with Inkscape - the px one or the pt one might be interesting.

[Cathy9887]

Thank you, Brynn!!  I'll give those links a check to see if I can get the scaling fixed - I'm kinda excited about it.  How awesome would it be to have my 2 most necessary systems actually speaking the "same language"?  LOL!  And no.. I don't usually have freezing or lag when working on designs.  We specifically got this laptop with much better specs to handle all that.  The long loading I'm talking about is only in DS when I have to import an SVG file from Inkscape, which has been sooooooo improperly scaled, that DS thinks a t-shirt design needs to be 487 inches wide.  LOL


Moini - Templates??  What are these templates you speak of??  (I'm totally self-taught, and have typically kept my knowledge on a need-to-know level.... if I haven't NEEDED to do something, then I'm sure I don't know how to do it yet.  I'm not even entirely positive I'm doing the things I AM doing in the correct fashion.  LOL


Can't wait to get the kids on the bus tomorrow AM so I can dive into some Inkscape learnin'!!  <3

Thanks again!!  Will post an update.......

[brynn]

I can at least partly answer for Moini about the templates.  File menu > New from template...  Then if you choose "default px" the file is automatically set up to use px as units.  After you go through the process that is explained in one of the links I gave, you would not need to use the template.  But there's also no problem with using it anyway.

I'm actually not sure what the "default pt" template does.  I thought pt was a text or font measurement.  So maybe it's meant for use with an all text document or something.  But that's only a guess.

You could also create your own custom template, if you have a need for it, and want to make one.  For example, if you always use a grid in your work, or in some segment of your work, you might make a template with a grid, so that it's there automatically when you open a new file, and you don't have to go and open a grid manually.  Or if you have some kind of special background that you always use, or if the only thing you ever make with Inkscape is one particular size, you can make the template in the proper size, and not have to manually set the size every time.  Anything you can do with Inkscape can be put into a template.

I don't know if fixing the scale as described in the link I gave will solve your problem.  But it might.  If it doesn't, we'll need to investigate further.  (One of your comments gives me the impression that there might be some known scale problem between Cricut and Inkscape, which I'm not aware of.  So we'll see what happens after you do those steps.)